Minutes before a news conference Friday in which President Trump declared victory over the coronavirus pandemic by touting historic job growth, White House aides moved chairs that had been six feet apart and placed them right next to one another in the Rose Garden. The move to defy the federal government’s own social distancing rules during the televised event reflected a broader shift within the White House, which is attempting to turn the page from a pandemic that has killed more than 107,000 Americans by focusing on other issues and playing down the continuing danger posed by the virus.

Joe Biden officially clinched the Democratic nomination for president as of Friday evening, according to CBS News' estimate. This is Biden's third bid for the presidency, and he prevailed over more than two dozen primary opponents -- in part, because voters believed he has the best shot against President Trump in November.

Now, after a high-stakes and public feud with Democratic officials in a state he won four years ago, Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee are moving to largely shift convention proceedings, including the president’s acceptance speech on the final night, out of Charlotte. After a call with the R.N.C., state chairmen officially told delegates that they should hold off on purchasing airline tickets to Charlotte for the late-August event.

From an FBI command center in Washington’s Chinatown neighborhood, Attorney General William P. Barr has orchestrated a stunning show of force on the streets of the nation’s capital — a battalion of federal agents, troops and police designed to restore order, but one that critics say carries grim parallels to heavy-handed foreign regimes.

For weeks, President Donald Trump has been eager to publicly turn the page on the coronavirus pandemic. Now fears are growing within the White House that the very thing that finally shoved the virus from center stage — mass protests over the death of George Floyd — may bring about its resurgence.

President Trump claimed on Wednesday that he had not hunkered down in a secure bunker as hundreds of protesters gathered around the White House last Friday night. He said Secret Service had not raced him to the secret underground location. And he described his trip to the subterranean space as a “tiny little short” visit that was really “much more for an inspection.” But the president’s alternate history, which he unspooled to Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio Wednesday, was a false on